@agami

Quote:

What are you saying? 1. If A-EON was operating at Apple scale, it would be OK to spend £2000 on A1 just for web browsing and email? or 2. If A-EON was operating at Apple scale, users would be paying much less for an A1 that can't even do web browsing and email properly?

I think we all know that if A-EON had the resources to target a market the size of Apple's share of the desktop market the hardware would be a lot less expensive and we would have a web browser just as capable of those available on any other platform.

The complaint levelled at Apple is that they charge way more than they need to out of pure greed. The base model M1 Mac Mini costs £699. It doesn't come with a mouse an keyboard so you'll probably want the official Apple items. If you opt for the silver mouse and the keyboard without a numeric keypad and you'll have to stump up another £178, if you want the numeric keypad add another £30 and if you want them in grey add another £20 to each taking the total to £248. Yes, £248 for a keyboard and mouse.

The basic M1 model comes with 8Gb RAM and a 250GB M.2 SSD*. Let's say you want to max it out with 16GB and a 2TB SSD, well you can slap another £1000 to the price tag. I bet for £1000 you can build yourself a fairly decent gaming rig with 16GB ram and a well specced 2TB M.2 NVME SSD included.

*Is the SSD Apple supply even NVME or just a run of the mill SSD?

@amigang Quote:

amigang wrote: First Apple Arm powered devices, powered by M1. https://www.apple.com/ MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini 3x performance,

This is pure Apple marketing (with software using some hardware acceleration on its SoC).

Real-world performances of the chip are much lower and in the x86/x64 ballpark, albeit they made a GREAT work (which is obvious, if you compare the architectures and see how MANY resources Apple used on its HUGE cores).

@clebin Quote:

clebin wrote: Quote: clebin wrote: Let's just wait for the benchmarks shall we? Well... there we are then.

Geekbench is pure crap.
Quote:

But as amigang says, it's just overpriced iPad hardware. No-one's going to care that the entry-level MacBook Air is faster than the current top-of-the-range i9-based MacBook Pro, except with no fan and an 18-hour battery life.

Preliminary tests from AnandTech are much more realistic, and similar to x86/x64.

@Fl@sh Quote:

Fl@sh wrote: @clebin it's really incredible how much inefficient x86 is!

No, it's incredible how much resources Apple put in its huge core.

You can take a look at the second page of AnandTech tech analysis, where they report some numbers about the M1 micro-architecture, and compare them to Intel's and AMD's ones.

BTW, Intel is the one which is using much less resources (on average) at the micro-architecture level, because its blocked by the problems with its production process. So, Intel has much more room to improve its micro-architecture.

@kamelito Quote:

kamelito wrote: The problem is the OS, it is far too obsolete for today standard so better stick to 68k.

It was obsolete already in the '90: too much bounded to the hardware (no abstraction layer: the o.s. was just the direct mapping of the Amiga chipset), without any memory protection neither resources tracking.
And, the pearl: in which o.s. have you seen that you need to manually set the application stack, because you had some crash otherwise (and maybe sporadic)?

The Amiga o.s. had to be redesigned from the ground to be more modern. Something which Commodore did not, as well as all other "Amiga/-like" o.ses which are just porting to other architectures or a rewriting. So, nothing really "NG".

@amigang

Quote:

amigang wrote: What Im saying is Im a die hard Amiga fan, anyone who even reads this I think would qualify. I knew what I was getting, and I think the AmigaONE X1000 was/is a dam fine effort when you think about the budget and size of the community. No need to attack that effort. Yes do I wish it was better in not just software support but in price, yes, I think we all would but I think A-eon did what they could with the resource they had.

Nevertheless, the X1000 is an obsolete and overpriced piece of hardware, which resembles NOTHING of the original Amigas.

But it's ok for OS4 fans. Nothing to say if they want to spend their money for something like that: passion is passion, and it shouldn't be necessarily rational...
Quote:

Apple most likely spent the budget and have more staff than the entire AmigaOne development to run one Apple Store, what I dont like is the rising cost of computing hardware, when I was a kid, my family couldn't afford a PC or Mac, and was kind of teased at school for it. Teachers and the world made it seem you needed Windows or a Mac to get computing done. I did a lot of my school and college work on my Amiga, and I realised later on just how much it pushed above it weight in letting me do the work and found it shocking and a crime that in the late 90s there was no real home affordable computer, my first PC was a second hand run down business PC, that I needed to have simple due to the software no longer being on the Amiga. Amiga helped me as a kid get into computing, that without it I would of been simple priced out of my family if it was left up to Apple. which is why I do have a particular dislike for them, specially when a lot of there adverts is about there device empower you and you need apple to be successful. well Im sorry it BS!! And I do feel sorry for kids today who I know most likely get teased for not owing an iPhone or not having a MacBook or the parents being conned into thinking they need to spend that much to have a good a computer.

I'd more or less the same experience with the Amiga and PC.

However nowadays (from some years, in reality) you have SBCs which you can buy with a few bucks and that obliterate any "post-Commodore" machines in terms of performances and usability.

If you want to thinker with something very, very low-cost you can go with a RPi, which is way cheaper than any Amiga of the time, in comparison.

Apple is for another customers market, and I don't understand why you're complaining against it, since there are way cheaper alternatives. The market is big, and Apple owns (only) part of it...

@NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @Hypex Yes, there is lot untapped potential in X1000, X5000, and even X1222 that is coming. The PowerPC chips use might not compete with fastest x64’s 8 cores, but they are crazy fast compared to 680x0. In my PC I have old i5, I thinking about upgrading the CPU, but there is really no point, I don’t need the extra CPU power, I wonder if come to point where its not really a need for anything faster, I wonder if the software bloat as problem catching up, right now.

And you also don't need an expensive PowerPC machine for running 68K code faster than the old Amiga machines: a low-end and way cheaper PC can do it much faster...

@IridiumFX Quote:

IridiumFX wrote: Sometimes I feel honestly confused to see all these Amiga (custom hardware down its DNA, OS custom tailored to fit the hardware like a dress) people denigrating the only company doing custom designs still alive. I am so confused about the rants about the superiority of the beige box of standard connectors that to my eyes it seems I am reading comments of pc guys. Then I remember this is actually AmigaWorld, so it's probably sarcasm and the dumb is certainly me being unable to see it, because there's no way the Amiga paladins here have really mutated to become PC salespeople. Or, even worse, what once was a proud community, cannot have become a "there's an apple sticker on it, so 100000 engineers working to create a product automatically suck and their brains will only start working again once they leave Apple"

Maybe because the Amiga platform died very long time ago, and what's left is either a PC or a Mac?

You know why human beings survived and are dominating now? Because they were able to adapt to changing/ed environment...

@NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @IridiumFX Well I love a few custom chips in AmigaONE,

I reveal you a "secret": there's NOTHING custom on Amigaone's chips. They are ordinary components that anybody can buy in the market.
Quote:

but sadly it was not deigned that way, having the legacy PAULA, CIAA/CIAB and bitter might have helped a lot software.

Which software? Games? They need a 68K as well.
Quote:

Most of 680x0 software is not abstracted, from the hardware, well there always option like sound.device and gameport.device, and lowlevel.device etc, and timer.device, and graphic.library but most people who writing software for 680x0 suck.. they don't care about syetem devices and libraries. let's poke the hardware they say...

They only one which sucks here is you, because it's quite evident that you never opened Commodore's Amiga Hardware manual.

Directly hitting the hardware was a perfectly "legal" way to use the Amiga hardware.

BUT you had to follow Commodore's guidelines, of course. And here stays the real problem: many coders were lamers which had just blindly writing lines of code ignoring those guidelines.
That's the primary reason why there were so many problems even by just using machines with slightly hardware changes (e.g.: real fast ram instead of the "slow" ram).
Quote:

When games in 2020 are released as ADF and can’t be installed on HD, without warping it in WHDLOAD, there is something really wrong.

First, it's perfectly legit (see above).

Second, which games are still released on 2020 for Amiga?
Quote:

And its not the computer its wrong with..

Maybe it's the user that is wrong? Wrong expectations from the Amiga ecosystem (see above).

@cdimauro

Quote:

Maybe it's the user that is wrong? Wrong expectations from the Amiga ecosystem (see above).

If we had right product, we be getting new users, way is Raspberry outselling any Classic Amiga system, well maybe it is because it has OK graphic features, it has modern sound, and modern CPU, and it is not limited to 2 colors. And price is low. And it’s not made from butchered old computers.

Another thing in Amiga community fail to understand is nostalgia. Nostalgia require that you actually have good memory of using a system when you where young, kids of today don’t know what a Amiga system is, they remember the PS1, maybe, or maybe XBOX1 or PS2, they had when they were young. So you can’t grow a community on nostalgia.

Continuing down the path of writing software that does not support hardware upgrades, is perfect way to prohibit growth.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 08:29 AM.

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

@NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Maybe it's the user that is wrong? Wrong expectations from the Amiga ecosystem (see above). If we had right product, we be getting new users, way is Raspberry outselling any Classic Amiga system, well maybe it is because it has OK graphic features, it has modern sound, and modern CPU, and it is not limited to 2 colors. And price is low. And it’s not made from butchered old computers.

Indeed. The GPU isn't that modern, but it's like sci-fi compared to our Amigas.
Quote:

Another thing in Amiga community fail to understand is nostalgia. Nostalgia require that you actually have good memory of using a system when you where young, kids of today don’t know what a Amiga system is, they remember the PS1, maybe, or maybe XBOX1 or PS2, they had when they were young. So you can’t grow a community on nostalgia.

And that's normal: kids grow-up primarily with the consoles (which supplanted the home computers for "cheap videogaming") and later on with PCs/Macs.

Which is, again, normal: people uses what's available.
Quote:

Continuing down the path of writing software that does not support hardware upgrades, is perfect way to prohibit growth.

It's not realistic to expect that a dead market grows.

We lost the train to remain a contender in the mainstream market when Commodore went in bankrupt, because the subsequent companies had no clear and especially no quick plans to move ahead and stay competitive and... stay alive.

So, there's really no point on thinking about reviving the post-Commodore market. As I've said before, it's a retroplatform, and it's better to enjoy it as it is, without any expectation on reviving it, which is an absolute non-sense.

BTW, there wasn't a real hardware upgrade in the past, and there isn't now as well.
The problem is what I've already written: the Amiga o.s. was too much bounded to the chipset, and this crippled the future of both the o.s./applications and the hardware expansion/modernization.
RTG (CGX, P96) and AHI are just dirty patches over an o.s. which was (and is) "bad by design". In fact, they allowed only limited hardware advancements.
Not even talking of the CPUs, which were and are weak: greatly under-powered and super-expensive (for the performances and features that you get).

What's the point on doing a cardiopulmonary resuscitation to a cadaver which is in decomposition status from 20-25 years?

IMHO primary reason about amiga's death after commodore/escom/gateway/viscorp/etc.. failures is the company fragmentation of legal rights/proprieties among many different companies/actors.

There should has been, long time ago already, a come back of amiga brand due its good reminders in a large part of pre millenials people.

It was not possible just for stupid legal battles, who destroyed all involved companies, and customers, and passionate.

Second reason we are still writing about 68k or ppc, when the most important amiga feature was it's microkernel os, heavily based on proprietary custom chipset.

Today we can emulate a stupid 68k with an old arm cpu, who costs few bucks, or with any x86/ppc at full equivalent speed of an a600/1200/4000 amigas.

..And than what have we done?
An fpga who emulates 68k!! What a waste of transistors!
Yes I'm referring to vampire, but certainly I'm not against it.
Indeed I love it but IMHO could be much better put any recent arm cpu to emualte 68k and use fpga resources to emulate custom chipsets like Aga (or better AgaNG) and use arm native instruction set as 68k acceleration, letting use it directly from amiga emulation side.

For ppc sphere instead we made some motherboards with a powerful cpu chip ok, but without any custom chipset.
..so what difference against a trivial x86 pc? Why not implement and use an fpga with a custom chipset hardware and build a new amiga around it?

We simply don't have the force to use third party, closed hardware, cards and write drivers for them, and this will not change in future.

Apple maybe is what today is more near to old amiga prospective with own hardware and a perfectly integrated OS, with BIG difference they wrote software respecting rules.
So porting everything to another arch isn't impossible as showed at least two times until now.

Last edited by Fl@sh on 14-Nov-2020 at 11:25 AM.

_________________
Pegasos II G4@1GHz 2GB Radeon 9250 256MB
AmigaOS4.1 fe - MorphOS - Debian 9 Jessie

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: Geekbench is pure crap... Preliminary tests from AnandTech are much more realistic, and similar to x86/x64.

Anandtech have no preliminary tests of the M1 chip, only iPhone benchmarks. Or am I missing something?

Anandtech, 10th November:

"We currently do not have Apple Silicon devices and likely won’t get our hands on them for another few weeks, but we do have the A14, and expect the new Mac chips to be strongly based on the microarchitecture we’re seeing employed in the iPhone designs. Of course, we’re still comparing a phone chip versus a high-end laptop and even a high-end desktop chip, but given the performance numbers, that’s also exactly the point we’re trying to make here, setting the stage as the bare minimum of what Apple could achieve with their new Apple Silicon Mac chips."

Last edited by clebin on 14-Nov-2020 at 10:42 AM.

@cdimauro

Quote:

Not even talking of the CPUs, which were and are weak: greatly under-powered and super-expensive (for the performances and features that you get).

And this way people wrote bad software back in the day. Another thing is that coding books on writing C code, vs coding books on how to write assembler, while the C tutorials focus on the OS, the assembler tutorials focus on how to hijack the OS, and turning your amiga system into game engine, for the standard hardware. with no support network, sound card or midi or other upgrades common to 1970’s MSDOS games.

The tragic comic part about it all is all the FPS games run really well on Amiga systems are MSDOS/Windows ports that support RTG and AHI, the number of people that have RTG and a upgraded Amiga must be really big part of community, they selling accelerator card back early 90’s for Amiga500, remember the GVP products, Warp/060, and Vampire cards adds to that long list.

We finally got Diablo ported to Amiga, a game you play on any dumpster dive PC, you think because this game is retro it brings in new customers, well if the game can be run in any DOSBOX emulator, it hard to image anyone see it as selling point. Don’t get me wrong I do appreciate old classic games being open sourced, after they reached their commercial value.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 11:07 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 10:58 AM.

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

@Fl@sh

Quote:

We simply don't have the force to use third party, closed hardware, cards and write drivers for them, and this will not change in future.

That’s kind of true, but compared to ReactOS that does not have drivers for USB, and SATA, and does not support modern partition tables, we are not doing too bad.

But if you look at BeOS now Haiku that is also suffering, we have drivers some of the open source operating systems are dreaming about, but if AmigaOS had gone 100% open source we be in the same position without any funding of driver development.

I don't think we should give up on it, we never get all driver or support all the hardware, we can support some of the hardware, and I think this right approach.

But if you can’t even connect modern hardware to your Amiga, that will never happen.

And if developer ignore that upgrades do exist on Amiga, and that people like to use this upgrades, then they are sabotaging progress.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 11:29 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 11:29 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 11:24 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 14-Nov-2020 at 11:20 AM.

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

@cdimauro

Quote:

If you want to thinker with something very, very low-cost you can go with a RPi, which is way cheaper than any Amiga of the time, in comparison.

I also believe Amiga should of been targetting the low end more and cheaper computers, but in the late 90s there was two clear choice for a future Amiga, either x86 or PPC, ARM was just not up to it back then. So I get why Amiga market leaned towards PPC, but by it very nature of there being no low-cost home computer market back then, the idea of building the best low cost PPC chip was not on the minds of IBM, Motorola or Apple, it was to try and keep up with the high end intel processors.

By the time OS4 got in development I can still see why PPC was a choice for the OS to go in. Even when Apple dropped PPC and the future of PPC seem a lot more murky in 2006-ish I think ARM chips where only just starting maybe to become a option but again it wasn't until the mobile phone wars started (a few years after this) did loads of resources and improvements on Arm cpu happen, by this point Amiga community was a much smaller and hobbyist platform. And unfortunately for the OS4 market where stuck on PPC arguably a dead platform, but you still can have fun on these machine. I think the A1222 is the right idea but I feel its delay has really hurt it chances to change much in the OS4 market.

Which bring us up today, I personally would love to see OS4 and it software ported to Pi / Arm I think it would be quite successful on that platform. But I understand the many reason why it not going to happen, lucky we got a great community, we might not have the branding and certain things have to be done differently but Aros and the emulation scene I think it where my focus of the NG Amiga is shifting too.

_________________
AmigaNG, YouTube, LeaveReality Studio

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

So you can’t grow a community on nostalgia.

This is a good point. I think there is some growth to be had there, but not much. Example: I have a friend who restores cars that were made before he was born, so it is possible to "manufacture" nostalgia, but it's still a pretty limited market.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@cdimauro

Quote:

Maybe because the Amiga platform died very long time ago, and what's left is either a PC or a Mac? You know why human beings survived and are dominating now? Because they were able to adapt to changing/ed environment...

my good friend, I am not questioning human evolution, but rather human coherency.

The coherency of ranting against a company, its products, its users and community, trying to promote our own ignorance, misconceptions and plain simple lies as a scientific evidence of sorts.

It was bad when we were 14, it's ridiculous now that we're probably close or into our 40s.
Lest we not forget the target of this continuous slander campaign, Apple, is the most Commodore-alike company in existence. Can you see my point a little better now ?

Last edited by IridiumFX on 14-Nov-2020 at 07:11 PM.

@amigang

Quote:

but in the late 90s there was two clear choice for a future Amiga, either x86 or PPC, ARM was just not up to it back then

Actually, there was a pretty decent ARM CPU in the late 90s very suitable to cheaper computers, the DEC StrongARM. It was released in 1997/98, with clock speeds up to 300 MHz. There was also a version with a multimedia coprocessor that had a FP unit. This later became Intel XScale as Intel inherited it as part of the court settlement. The family was developed further and later sold to Marvel

Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 14-Nov-2020 at 07:37 PM.
Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 14-Nov-2020 at 07:36 PM.
Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 14-Nov-2020 at 07:35 PM.
Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 14-Nov-2020 at 07:34 PM.

_________________

@IridiumFX

Quote:

The coherency of ranting against a company, its products, its users and community, trying to promote our own ignorance, misconceptions and plain simple lies as a scientific evidence of sorts. ....Lest we not forget the target of this continuous slander campaign, Apple, is the most Commodore-alike company in existence. Can you see my point a little better now ?

True, Apple has the vertical integration thing all tied up better than Commodore despite their best efforts with MOS etc. They had to use a Motorola CPU for the Amiga due to the Los Gatos Amiga Team decision and they never really invested heavily in upgrading the fabs other than from NMOS to CMOS or an upgrade to SMT chips. I don't think that C= could have got away with a 16bit 6502 derivative (something like the WDC 65C816) for the Amiga even if they'd been part of the original design team.

Apple will be heralded if they pull off the transition to Apple Silicon. If they show up Intel in energy efficiency AND power then what have Intel got left other than x86-64 compatibility?

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Fl@sh Quote:

Fl@sh wrote: IMHO primary reason about amiga's death after commodore/escom/gateway/viscorp/etc.. failures is the company fragmentation of legal rights/proprieties among many different companies/actors. There should has been, long time ago already, a come back of amiga brand due its good reminders in a large part of pre millenials people. It was not possible just for stupid legal battles, who destroyed all involved companies, and customers, and passionate.

Legal fights came when the market was already lost.
Quote:

Second reason we are still writing about 68k or ppc, when the most important amiga feature was it's microkernel os, heavily based on proprietary custom chipset.

Its microkernel, bounded to the chipset, is also the reason why the Amiga platform wasn't competitive anymore, since other o.ses./platforms were able to provide much more solid/stable/future-oriented environments and big technology progresses.
Quote:

Today we can emulate a stupid 68k with an old arm cpu, who costs few bucks, or with any x86/ppc at full equivalent speed of an a600/1200/4000 amigas. ..And than what have we done? An fpga who emulates 68k!! What a waste of transistors! Yes I'm referring to vampire, but certainly I'm not against it. Indeed I love it but IMHO could be much better put any recent arm cpu to emualte 68k and use fpga resources to emulate custom chipsets like Aga (or better AgaNG) and use arm native instruction set as 68k acceleration, letting use it directly from amiga emulation side.

I don't understand why we have to waste transistors too on emulating only the chipset, and even more for an "AGANG" which has zero software for it (and even if some is developed, you'll count it in the fingers of your hands).

(Win|E)UAE running on any existing hardware platform should be enough for enjoying the old binaries (games, applications).
Quote:

For ppc sphere instead we made some motherboards with a powerful cpu chip ok, but without any custom chipset. ..so what difference against a trivial x86 pc? Why not implement and use an fpga with a custom chipset hardware and build a new amiga around it?

Because its a waste of resources/time, since there'll be no software for it, since the post-Commodore market is a nano-niche.

You can develop a new "Amiga" platform if you know that there'll be consistent support. Can you guarantee it? I don't think so.
Quote:

We simply don't have the force to use third party, closed hardware, cards and write drivers for them, and this will not change in future.

Yes: there are no forces. So, no development.
Quote:

Apple maybe is what today is more near to old amiga prospective with own hardware and a perfectly integrated OS, with BIG difference they wrote software respecting rules. So porting everything to another arch isn't impossible as showed at least two times until now.

Indeed. Apple is close to what Commodore was, and since she has (especially now with its CPUs and GPUs) full control of both hardware and software, she can do (and optimize) whatever she wants, self-driving her future.

It's funny to note that Commodore had to chance to buy Apple in the past...


@clebin Quote:

clebin wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: Geekbench is pure crap... Preliminary tests from AnandTech are much more realistic, and similar to x86/x64. Anandtech have no preliminary tests of the M1 chip, only iPhone benchmarks. Or am I missing something? Anandtech, 10th November: "We currently do not have Apple Silicon devices and likely won’t get our hands on them for another few weeks, but we do have the A14, and expect the new Mac chips to be strongly based on the microarchitecture we’re seeing employed in the iPhone designs. Of course, we’re still comparing a phone chip versus a high-end laptop and even a high-end desktop chip, but given the performance numbers, that’s also exactly the point we’re trying to make here, setting the stage as the bare minimum of what Apple could achieve with their new Apple Silicon Mac chips."

The A14 and M1 cores should be the same. There might be some (slight) difference in peak frequency, and there's a difference in the number of cores. Hence my "preliminary tests".

In fact, from AnandTech:

"In the following page we’ll be investigating the A14’s Firestorm cores which will be used in the M1 as well, and also do some extensive benchmarking on the iPhone chip, setting the stage as the minimum of what to expect from the M1"


@NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Not even talking of the CPUs, which were and are weak: greatly under-powered and super-expensive (for the performances and features that you get). And this way people wrote bad software back in the day.

I don't see the connection: bad software can be written in any condition/language.
Quote:

Another thing is that coding books on writing C code, vs coding books on how to write assembler, while the C tutorials focus on the OS, the assembler tutorials focus on how to hijack the OS,

Which makes absolute sense, if you want to squeeze the most from the hardware. The o.s. was "too much" (waste of resources), since resources were low.

Should I remind you that we had a 7Mhz CPU and NOT enough memory bandwidth to just re-draw the entire screen?

When I was working to Fightin' Spirit I've also used self-modifying code (yes. And don't be scared: it was legal too according to Commodore's guidelines! However it should have been removed in the final code, because it wasn't needed anymore for other reasons) to squeeze the most from a bare OCS Amiga with 512KB of chipmem and 512KB of "slow ram".
Without all the tricks that I've used/invented this game wouldn't have run at 25 FPS (with some rare 17FPS peak); in fact, the original code had a variable frame rate of 12-17FPS.
Have you enjoyed a beat'em-up which resembled a NeoGeo one? Colorful, with big Bobs/sprites, tons of characters animations, a lot of music samples. But you have to pay a price for it...

Please, show me how to do it while keeping the o.s. alive and steeling both CPU cycles and memory (especially), and I'll put you a red carpet to your feet.
Quote:

and turning your amiga system into game engine, for the standard hardware.

Which is what most of the Amiga customers had. So, we satisfied them: which is the main goal for a developer.
Quote:

with no support network, sound card or midi or other upgrades common to 1970’s MSDOS games.

You're talking of things which came MANY YEARS after the Amigas, and even in the DOS land (which, btw, came in 1981, and NOT in '70s).
Quote:

The tragic comic part about it all is all the FPS games run really well on Amiga systems are MSDOS/Windows ports that support RTG and AHI, the number of people that have RTG and a upgraded Amiga must be really big part of community, they selling accelerator card back early 90’s for Amiga500, remember the GVP products, Warp/060, and Vampire cards adds to that long list. We finally got Diablo ported to Amiga, a game you play on any dumpster dive PC, you think because this game is retro it brings in new customers, well if the game can be run in any DOSBOX emulator, it hard to image anyone see it as selling point. Don’t get me wrong I do appreciate old classic games being open sourced, after they reached their commercial value.

I don't understand why people hasn't just used a PC with DOS to enjoy those games, instead of crippled Amiga ports.

BTW, accelerators weren't so common in the Amiga land, because they were very expensive. In fact, the target for the developers were the base Amiga machines (OCS/ECS with 512+512KB, and the Amiga 1200 for AGA).


@amigang Quote:

amigang wrote: @cdimauro Quote: If you want to thinker with something very, very low-cost you can go with a RPi, which is way cheaper than any Amiga of the time, in comparison. I also believe Amiga should of been targetting the low end more and cheaper computers, but in the late 90s there was two clear choice for a future Amiga, either x86 or PPC, ARM was just not up to it back then. So I get why Amiga market leaned towards PPC, but by it very nature of there being no low-cost home computer market back then, the idea of building the best low cost PPC chip was not on the minds of IBM, Motorola or Apple, it was to try and keep up with the high end intel processors. By the time OS4 got in development I can still see why PPC was a choice for the OS to go in.

I don't think so. Even Apple, in the 2000, was about to leave the PowerPCs and jump to IA-32/Intel, because those processors weren't competitive anymore. Jobs decide to stay with the PowerPCs only because an IBM manager promised him the (in)famous G5. But this only delayed the transition of some years.

So, PowerPCs weren't already a good choice when OS4 development started.
Quote:

Even when Apple dropped PPC and the future of PPC seem a lot more murky in 2006-ish I think ARM chips where only just starting maybe to become a option but again it wasn't until the mobile phone wars started (a few years after this) did loads of resources and improvements on Arm cpu happen,

As someone already reported, there were some nice ARMs, but not competitive with x86 in terms of performances.
Quote:

by this point Amiga community was a much smaller and hobbyist platform.

AFAIR the Amiga OS 3.5 sold 50K copies, which were peanuts. So, the market was already too small at the time.
Quote:

And unfortunately for the OS4 market where stuck on PPC arguably a dead platform, but you still can have fun on these machine. I think the A1222 is the right idea but I feel its delay has really hurt it chances to change much in the OS4 market.

The idea of a cheap AmigaOne platform was good, but they select a poor CPU which isn't even PowerPC-compatible, increasing a lot the effort for supporting it.

But nothing uncommon: Commodore's history is full of wrong decisions, and the same happened to her heirs...
Quote:

Which bring us up today, I personally would love to see OS4 and it software ported to Pi / Arm I think it would be quite successful on that platform.

Indeed: very low cost, common, and with a bright future.
Quote:

But I understand the many reason why it not going to happen,

Lack of resources... for such big change.

However a single person is working to an interesting high-performance 68K emulator running on ARM in "big-endian mode" (let me simplify), which looks promising and can be a concrete starting point.
Quote:

lucky we got a great community, we might not have the branding and certain things have to be done differently but Aros and the emulation scene I think it where my focus of the NG Amiga is shifting too.

I agree.


@IridiumFX Quote:

IridiumFX wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Maybe because the Amiga platform died very long time ago, and what's left is either a PC or a Mac? You know why human beings survived and are dominating now? Because they were able to adapt to changing/ed environment... my good friend, I am not questioning human evolution, but rather human coherency. The coherency of ranting against a company, its products, its users and community, trying to promote our own ignorance, misconceptions and plain simple lies as a scientific evidence of sorts. It was bad when we were 14, it's ridiculous now that we're probably close or into our 40s.

The main problem is the fanaticism which is still dominating on some people. They might be 40s, 50s (I'll be 50 next year), but it looks like they are still teenagers fighting for their favorite brand. The registry age has nothing to do with the brain age...

I don't get why people doesn't understand that we're talking of just hardware and software: "iron" and "immaterial" pieces.
Quote:

Lest we not forget the target of this continuous slander campaign, Apple, is the most Commodore-alike company in existence. Can you see my point a little better now ?

Absolutely, and I agree that Apple is the closest company to Commodore, nowadays.


@BigD Quote:

BigD wrote: @IridiumFX Quote: The coherency of ranting against a company, its products, its users and community, trying to promote our own ignorance, misconceptions and plain simple lies as a scientific evidence of sorts. ....Lest we not forget the target of this continuous slander campaign, Apple, is the most Commodore-alike company in existence. Can you see my point a little better now ? True, Apple has the vertical integration thing all tied up better than Commodore despite their best efforts with MOS etc. They had to use a Motorola CPU for the Amiga due to the Los Gatos Amiga Team decision and they never really invested heavily in upgrading the fabs other than from NMOS to CMOS or an upgrade to SMT chips. I don't think that C= could have got away with a 16bit 6502 derivative (something like the WDC 65C816) for the Amiga even if they'd been part of the original design team.

Commodore owned MOS, but the management ruined this jewel. Again: nothing uncommon.

The main problem with Commodore is that the Amiga used the 68K processors from Motorola, so they didn't developed them in-house, like the 6502/10/8502 of its 8-bit home computer. So, you're relying on an external company and you're bounded to its decisions.

However we saw that Commodore was unable to have a good path even for its chipset, with delays even on small updates (ECS) and complete craps (AGA: an HORRIBLE patch over ECS) for things which improved the features set.

Commodore had an endemic nature to make mistakes at all levels...
Quote:

Apple will be heralded if they pull off the transition to Apple Silicon.

They already shown plans to abandon Intel in 2 years...
Quote:

If they show up Intel in energy efficiency AND power then what have Intel got left other than x86-64 compatibility?

Intel, as I said before, is blocked by the problems with her production processes. But she has a huge margins to improve her micro-architectures (just read AnandTech article to see how MANY resources Apple put on its core to reach that performances).

Finally and regarding the x86-64 compatibility, well: isn't it a BIG value when you have most of the software market? The software remains the most important thing, right? That's the thing which customers are using, at the very end.

P.S. Sorry, no time to read again.

@cdimauro

Quote:

When I was working to Fightin' Spirit I've also used self-modifying code (yes. And don't be scared: it was legal too according to Commodore's guidelines!

Not really problem as long flushed instruction cache, but 68000 did have instruction cache so no problem, it became problem on the 68010, that featured instruction cache, JIT used EUAE/WinUAE, or In other emulators is fundamentally trans compiler, so the concept of generate code on the fly is done today, but its not so common anymore. They way it done this day is threw objects that virtual methods, technically its modifying code, it provides different address to where methods are located, so one object look a lot like the base class, but have custom behavior for the object its suppose to be.

I even experimented on this MPlayer, where need to convert some audio data from float to integer, I wonted a routine, that generated ideal code unroll loop and fill up the instruction cache, but not over fill it, chousing cache flushes. Idea worked, but it was not that practical, because difference between the compiler optimized code, and my end result was not that big, and also number of unrolls beyond 4 did not make a lot of difference.

Quote:

BTW, accelerators weren't so common in the Amiga land, because they were very expensive. In fact, the target for the developers were the base Amiga machines (OCS/ECS with 512+512KB, and the Amiga 1200 for AGA).

True the developers killed off the incentive to upgrade, this never happened on MSDOS. Where got sock hardware from any computer store, the latest graphic cards, and sound card, it was also not too expensive to upgrade RAM, hard drives where too expensive on any computer. But option to connect hard drives in the A1200 was good choice.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 15-Nov-2020 at 02:29 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 15-Nov-2020 at 02:00 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:59 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:57 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 15-Nov-2020 at 11:12 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 15-Nov-2020 at 11:11 AM.

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

@cdimauro

Quote:

The A14 and M1 cores should be the same. There might be some (slight) difference in peak frequency, and there's a difference in the number of cores. Hence my "preliminary tests". In fact, from AnandTech: [i]"In the following page we’ll be investigating the A14’s Firestorm cores which will be used in the M1 as well, and also do some extensive benchmarking on the iPhone chip, setting the stage as the minimum of what to expect from the M1"[/I]

Agreed, but Anandtech themselves say it is "the bare minimum of what to expect". It's quite important to note that these are the iPhone benchmarks, if you're going to say "ignore the Geekbench results, but take what I'm saying at face value".

Anyway, we'll know in a few weeks. Doesn't change the fact you're getting damn good performance with an 18-hour battery life and no fan, and that was my point - that's what users will care about, not whether it's the same chip family as an iPad.

Last edited by clebin on 15-Nov-2020 at 12:12 PM.
Last edited by clebin on 15-Nov-2020 at 12:09 PM.

@all

people generally do not care about hardware today, they propably even do not know what hardware they use. They buy devices to do certain tasks, most younger people today will only know that it is android or iPhone (Apple) device and they even do not own a PC. Many younger people have no clue about IT, they are pure user of apps.

It is impossible to attract those people for something not known, whatever you offer.

And to modernize something like AmigaOS you would need to break all and change everything, you would need a new desktop that displays on different devices, you would need a new API that is offering new features, you need SMP and full MP, you would break any software. Who would write the new software because simply recompiling would not work... and why then not simply taking something like linux?

@cdimauro

In my view too amiga is a retroplatform today. There are many people in europe that still remember of the platform that might get interested. And there are people outside who like to be non-mainstream like many RPi-Users who also might get interested in something alternative. Both is niche but perhaps potential big enough for some live or "reviving". "Reviving" in sense of becoming serious competitor to the mainstream platforms is mission impossible. Adrian Cumming f.e. published a new game recently (Wiz). If that becomes a success and more developers do that, this would be a success already.

Regarding AGA, it was certainly not the "big jump" but at least A1200 was competitive compared to what was standard on PC already (VGA). It still lacked Fast-RAM and the processor could have been faster (f.e. 68030) but that propably was a problem because commodore wanted to earn something with it. Horrible sounds a little too much, in my view it was too late. I read that it was already ready for one year, instead of bringing it to the customers they published the really disappointing A600 and only after becoming under pressure by marketing and sales they used it for A1200 and A4000 making huge losses with a pile of unsellable A600... Commodore all the time really had no longterm-planning and longterm-development. They always had creative but underfinanced high-skilled developers but unfortunately overpaid clueless management...

Last edited by OlafS25 on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:55 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:52 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:52 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:45 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:40 PM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 15-Nov-2020 at 01:37 PM.

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: @IridiumFX Quote: The coherency of ranting against a company, its products, its users and community, trying to promote our own ignorance, misconceptions and plain simple lies as a scientific evidence of sorts. ....Lest we not forget the target of this continuous slander campaign, Apple, is the most Commodore-alike company in existence. Can you see my point a little better now ? True, Apple has the vertical integration thing all tied up better than Commodore despite their best efforts with MOS etc. They had to use a Motorola CPU for the Amiga due to the Los Gatos Amiga Team decision and they never really invested heavily in upgrading the fabs other than from NMOS to CMOS or an upgrade to SMT chips. I don't think that C= could have got away with a 16bit 6502 derivative (something like the WDC 65C816) for the Amiga even if they'd been part of the original design team. Apple will be heralded if they pull off the transition to Apple Silicon. If they show up Intel in energy efficiency AND power then what have Intel got left other than x86-64 compatibility?

Intel and AMD participate in a VHS style clone army with a unified software ecosystem and Xbox AA/AAA game exclusives.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@clebin

Quote:

clebin wrote: Quote: clebin wrote: Let's just wait for the benchmarks shall we? Well... there we are then. But as amigang says, it's just overpriced iPad hardware. No-one's going to care that the entry-level MacBook Air is faster than the current top-of-the-range i9-based MacBook Pro, except with no fan and an 18-hour battery life. They want it to be different from the iPad so that they can tell their friends... or something. I love how worked up some people get about Apple.

Where's the Blender 3D benchmark? Why does Apple keep dodging the Blender 3D benchmark?

Why Geekbench is not allowing GpGPU encryption/decryption workloads (e.g. cryptocurrency mining)?

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@Rob

Quote:

Rob wrote: @agami Quote: What are you saying? 1. If A-EON was operating at Apple scale, it would be OK to spend £2000 on A1 just for web browsing and email? or 2. If A-EON was operating at Apple scale, users would be paying much less for an A1 that can't even do web browsing and email properly? I think we all know that if A-EON had the resources to target a market the size of Apple's share of the desktop market the hardware would be a lot less expensive and we would have a web browser just as capable of those available on any other platform. The complaint levelled at Apple is that they charge way more than they need to out of pure greed. The base model M1 Mac Mini costs £699. It doesn't come with a mouse an keyboard so you'll probably want the official Apple items. If you opt for the silver mouse and the keyboard without a numeric keypad and you'll have to stump up another £178, if you want the numeric keypad add another £30 and if you want them in grey add another £20 to each taking the total to £248. Yes, £248 for a keyboard and mouse. The basic M1 model comes with 8Gb RAM and a 250GB M.2 SSD*. Let's say you want to max it out with 16GB and a 2TB SSD, well you can slap another £1000 to the price tag. I bet for £1000 you can build yourself a fairly decent gaming rig with 16GB ram and a well specced 2TB M.2 NVME SSD included. *Is the SSD Apple supply even NVME or just a run of the mill SSD?

$299 is Xbox Series S with 8 cores Zen 2 at 3.5Ghz CPU, 20 CU RDNA 2 GPU with hardware raytracing, 10 GB GDDR6 (224 GB/s bandwidth), and 512 GB SSD.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)